Tuesday afternoon hoops notes (Holmen, UNT women’s GPA, et cetera)

Tony Benford mentioned during his coach’s show last night that Jacob Holmen could be out for a while. I had a chance to follow up today.

It doesn’t sound good.

Holmen went down after colliding with another player in UNT’s win over South Alabama. Chris Jones, myself and a university spokesman started counting concussions today in practice.

That is usually a bad sign.

Holmen hit his head on the floor early last season in practice before a loss to Mississippi State, had another concussion late in the year and has now had one this year. That is three that we remembered at practice today. Holmen really had a tough time recovering from those concussions last year.

Tony Benford said that UNT is going to see how things go the rest of the season and at this point the concern is Holmen’s long-term health, not just basketball. The senior has his degree and a bright future no matter what he decides to do. I don’t think we will see Holmen on the floor for a while. It didn’t sound like he will head to Florida for the FIU-FAU swing this week.

Justin Patton is going to be in and out of the lineup the rest of the season. Patton and Holmen were not at practice today. Clarke Overlander was not going to work out either.

UNT is going to be really short in terms of players the rest of the way.

On the women’s front, UNT is spending a lot of time preparing for FIU guard Jerica Coley, who is averaging 23.8 points a game. Coley might be the best player in the Sun Belt.

What will be interesting to see is how UNT matches up with her considering the Mean Green has turned into a zone tam this year. UNT has some pretty good individual defenders like Desiree Nelson, BreAnna Dawkins and Loryn Goodwin.

Petersen seemed pretty set on sticking with what’s working, though.

And everything seems to be working for UNT at this point. The UNT women have won four straight.

In a side note, I mentioned that the UNT football team posted a really good team GPA.

To be fair, so did the UNT women. Of the 13 players on the team, 12 had a GPA of 3.0 or better.